The following article by Kenneth T. Walsh was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website July 28, 2017:
President Donald Trump’s empathy deficit could be his biggest problem.
Donald Trump’s core supporters admire his disruptive ways, his eagerness to shake up the status quo and his commitment to “the forgotten Americans” who feel left out and demeaned by the nation’s cultural and political elites. On the other side of the spectrum are Trump’s adversaries who see him as a self-absorbed, combative, uninformed Washington outsider who regularly exhibits an erratic, angry temperament and a troubling authoritarian streak.
The reality is that Trump is in some ways all of these things. But above all, Trump’s problem is that he believes his own spin that he is leading a cult of personality consisting of people who will follow him wherever he wants to lead. He operates as if he knows best on virtually everything, even in areas where he has no experience or expertise, such as foreign affairs, military issues, health care reform and dealing with Congress. Perhaps most damaging, Trump has what might be called an empathy deficit, an inability to put himself in other people’s shoes. And he has enormous difficulty dealing with criticism or people who he thinks are standing in his way or who have somehow wronged him.
This explains his over-the-top treatment of Jeff Sessions, his handpicked attorney general. Trump spent much of this week publicly hammering Sessions because the nation’s top law-enforcement officer hasn’t tamped down an investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election that includes possible coordination with Trump associates. Trump says Sessions shouldn’t have recused himself from presiding over the investigation even though Sessions had a potential conflict of interest. The result was that the probe is now being handled by special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director whom Trump says is conducting a ”witch hunt.” Trump also faults Sessions for being ”very, very weak” in investigating possible campaign transgressions by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, whom Trump defeated in November. Trump just can’t seem to put that campaign behind him or act graciously to his vanquished adversary. And Trump says Sessions should be ”much tougher on leaks in the intelligence agencies that are leaking like they never have before….You can’t let that happen.”
Conservative senators who served in Congress with Sessions are rallying to his defense but Trump persists in intensifying his attacks. His merciless pugnacity strikes many in Washington as counterproductive because Trump could simply make his criticisms known to Sessions privately without getting bogged down in a highly publicized feud. Public humiliation seems an unwise way to treat a loyalist who was one of the president’s early supporters and who today is aggressively pushing Trump’s agenda on a variety of fronts such as strongly backing the police and fighting illegal immigration.
Trump is also attacking other allies including Senate Republicans who aren’t in lockstep with his ideas on how to overhaul the nation’s health-care system and dismantle the health care law approved under Democratic President Barack Obama. Trump ominously told a rally in Youngstown, Ohio this week, ”Any senator who votes against repeal and replace [is] telling America they are OK with the Obamacare nightmare, and I predict they’ll have a lot of problems.”
One of the most important polls regarding the Trump presidency, conducted by Gallup in mid-July, found that most of those who disapprove of Trump don’t strongly oppose his policies. Instead, 65 percent of the ”disapprovers” fault Trump for his personality and character – the kind of callous, bullying, my-way-or-the-highway approach he exhibited this week. (Only 16 percent say they disapprove because of his stands on the issues, and 12 percent disapprove because they think that, overall, he governs poorly.)
A change in Trump’s over-the-top persona recently received support from two of Trump’s recent predecessors – Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush. Speaking at Bush’s presidential library in Dallas, they agreed that one of the most important traits that any president needs is humility – a characteristic that Trump seems to totally lack. Neither of the former presidents mentioned Trump by name but it was clear they were talking about him. “I think the most important thing is to be humble, to listen, to realize everybody’s got a story,” Clinton said. “If you want to be president, realize it’s about the people, not about you….And when it’s over – and that’s what a lot of these people who are real arrogant in office, they forget, time passes, and it passes more quickly than you know – you want to be able to say ‘people were better off when I quit, kids had a better future, things were coming together.’ You don’t want to say, ‘God, look at all the people I beat.'” Bush praised Clinton and raised an implied contrast to Trump by saying, “He was humble in victory, which is very important in dealing with other people.”
But at age 71, can Donald Trump change his stripes? There is no way to know. But this is the question that will be hanging over the 45th president for the rest of his term in office.
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